The Tiger's Child Page 9

  I didn’t answer. There was a sparky undercurrent to Sheila that showed itself more often than I was comfortable with. Much as she seemed to want to be with me, she also seemed easily irritated with me. Probably just adolescence. I wasn’t particularly gifted with adolescents, so that didn’t help any either. Whatever, I found it mildly upsetting.

  Sheila seemed to sense this and came back with a conciliatory tone. “I thought talking in Spanish might make him feel better. Like, more secure. It was just an idea.”

  “It was a good one. And did he understand you?”

  “I am fluent,” she retorted.

  “No, I mean, it will have been a long time since Alejo heard anyone speak Spanish to him, and even then it may have been a dialect.”

  “Yeah, he understood me. He came down, didn’t he?”

  Silence. I was approaching a major interstate junction on the freeway. There was the omnipresent roadwork and quite a lot of congestion, so for several minutes I concentrated on my driving. Once the traffic eased and I could relax, I listened into the silence.

  “You know, Sheila, I get this sort of ongoing feeling that you’re angry with me,” I said.

  “Me?” she replied with disbelief.

  “If there are things or people I like, you seem to go out of your way to show you dislike them. If I say something, you seem to make a point of proving me wrong. And there’s just this general tone of voice.”

  “Shit, you’re just listening to, like, every little thing I say, aren’t you?” she retorted. “And judging it.”

  “I’m not trying to.”

  “Well, you know, I don’t think you’re so great either,” she said. “In that book you wrote, you come off sounding so patient with everything and you’re not, you know.”

  I looked over. “What do you mean?”

  “You get angry with everything. Like, you swear at all these drivers.”

  “I’m not swearing.”

  “You might as well be,” Sheila said. “It’s like ‘Come on, lady!’ ‘Hurry up and get out there, mister,’ every second sentence, Torey. And, like, you got mad at me when I tried to get in the car and had hold of the door handle so you couldn’t unlock it.”

  “I didn’t get mad at you.”

  “You did! You said, ‘Let it go’ in a really bitchy tone of voice. Not like you talk in your book at all. In there, you’re so patient and kind. You wait forever in your book and never say a cross word, but now I can see how you really are and you get mad every other second.”

  “Not every other second, I’m sure.”

  “Seems like it to me,” she replied.

  “I’m human, Sheila. I get irritated sometimes. And irritable.”

  “That’s not like you are in One Child.”

  “No, maybe not. That’s a character in a book. People are too complex to be portrayed in their entirety on paper. And, in some parts, too boring.”

  Sheila snorted. “So you’re saying it’s not you.”

  “That character is the essence of me, but it isn’t me, no. I’m me. Here. Now.”

  Sheila snorted again. “Hot shit.”

  Chapter 13

  From dropping Sheila off at the bus station on Fenton Boulevard, I returned to the clinic. The conversation in the car had upset me, confirming as it did what intuition had already told me. She was angry with me. Why? Because I was annoyingly human, when she had expected the character from a book? I couldn’t imagine that would provoke the strength of feeling I was sensing from her.

  On the wall above my desk in the office, I’d hung the poem she had written me when she was twelve. Sitting down in my chair, I looked up at it.

  … Then you came

  With your funny way of being

  Not quite human …

  Whatever she wanted from me, it was different from what she was getting.

  Jeff opened the door and entered our small shared office. He was returning from a therapy session and had obviously had a close encounter with his client, because his hair was mussed and there was blue tempera paint on one cheek.

  “You look like I feel,” I said.

  He set his notepad down on his desk. “I am never going into infant psychiatry, I can tell you that,” he muttered none too good-naturedly. “Rosenthal can have that field entirely to himself. I am restricting myself to those who do not need finger paints.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to go in for adolescents,” I replied.

  Jeff raised an eyebrow. “Who’s getting to you? Your little orangutan?”

  I nodded and told him about the conversation in the car.

  Although I had filled Jeff in about Sheila’s past in general terms, such as the fact that she had been a student of mine, I had never gone into any great detail, including never having told him she was the subject of my book. Book publication being the lengthy process it is, One Child was not due for release for several more months; and being a little leery of how my venture into popular nonfiction would be received in professional circles, I had never talked much about it to any of my colleagues. Now I found myself not only explaining Sheila’s darker past but also our complex relationship.

  “Hoo,” Jeff said when I paused. “You do land yourself in some tortured situations, Hayden.”

  “So, what are your thoughts?” I asked. “What have I done wrong with this girl? I’ve stirred something up unintentionally.”

  He smiled gently. “You know what I think the real problem is here? You and Sheila both have a dose of the same disease. All she remembers is this wonderful teacher who never got mad at her and now she’s upset to discover just how ordinary and human you are; but, you know, Hayden, you’re doing the very same thing. What’s coloring your behavior toward her now is the fact that what you remember, too, is not Sheila as a real child, but rather the six-year-old character in a book.”

  “I do not.”

  “We all do,” Jeff replied. “That’s all memory is, our interpretation of what we’ve experienced. The only difference here is that most of us never get the book written.”

  “How much do you remember about your mother?” I asked Sheila the next afternoon, as I was driving her to the bus station.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I asked. How much do you remember about her?”

  Sheila didn’t answer. Turning her head away, she looked out the window.

  I listened into the silence, trying to discern what her emotions were. It had been a fairly good morning. After the drama of the previous day, everyone seemed content to keep things quiet. Jeff, Miriam and I were beginning to get a feel for each other’s working style and weren’t tripping over one another quite so often. Sheila still remained an outsider among us. She did not initiate much, either with the kids or with the three of us adults, and she didn’t participate easily, preferring, instead, to hover on the perimeters. This was all right, to my mind, as this wasn’t a field she was particularly familiar with and these were still early days. All in all, the day had gone quite well for everyone and we had gone off to lunch in high spirits, Sheila included.

  “Have you ever seen your mother again? I mean, since leaving my class?” I asked.

  Sheila shook her head.

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “No,” she replied, her voice quiet.

  Silence.

  “Do you remember her?”

  Again, Sheila did not answer me. Seconds rolled by and became minutes.

  I glanced over.

  “No,” she said quietly. “I don’t.”

  “Do you remember Jimmie?”

  “Jimmie …? You mean my brother?” A pensive silence. “I think I do. Maybe. I got this image in my mind … of someone with brown hair. It’s a memory, you know, from long ago and when I try to place it … I think perhaps it’s Jimmie.” She looked over. “Why? Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering. Do you miss your mother?”

  Sheila’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “What’s there to
miss? I don’t know her. I don’t even remember her. How could I miss her?”

  “Just wondering,” I replied.

  “You wonder a lot.”

  We had hit the roadwork section again and traffic had come to a standstill. Self-conscious of what Sheila had said the previous day regarding my attitude toward other drivers, I sat in silence.

  “There’s no reason I should miss my mother,” Sheila said quietly. “She was a lousy parent. It’s my dad who’s done everything for me.”

  “Well, I was just wondering. It was a big issue for you when we were together last time.”

  “I was still a little child then. I suppose it mattered more to me when I was six.”

  The next morning, we broke the children down into three small groups. The idea had been initially to let one person be in charge of Jessie and Joshua, who needed the most individual attention, and then to split the other six by age, so that one of us would have Kayleigh, David and Mikey, who were younger, and the other would have Alejo, Tamara and Violet, the older three. However, after Alejo’s extreme reaction to Tamara’s behavior, it seemed unwise to put the two of them together just yet; so we substituted David for her.

  I had this group of David, Alejo and Violet and I had decided on doing what I liked to call “guided drawing,” the making of pictures after a short period of visualization. I found this a useful technique for bringing out children’s emotions and it worked well with a small group. So we all sat down at one of the tables. I gave out large sheets of white paper and set in the middle of the table a variety of materials to choose from—thin felt tips, fat felt tips, crayons, colored pencils and plain pencils and pastel chalks.

  Sheila came and sat down with us. I had hoped she would help Miriam, who had Joshua and Jessie, as they needed virtually one-to-one attention, but she seemed uncomfortable with these children. Feeling it was better to let her warm up at her own speed, I said nothing and let her take out the chair at the end of the table.

  “All right,” I said and looked with enthusiastic anticipation at each of the three children sitting across from me, “know what we’re going to do today? We’re going for a ride in space.”

  “Hey, cool!” David said.

  “No, put your pen down, David. We don’t need pens yet. Instead, I want everybody to close their eyes. Closed? Alejo? Close your eyes. That’s right.” I closed my own eyes to encourage the others. “Now, here we go: Keep your eyes closed so that you can see the rocket ship. Can you see it? Make a picture of it in your mind. This is your rocket ship, the one that is going to carry you into space. Can everybody see it?” I looked around to see nodding heads.

  “Okay, here you go. You’re strapped into your seat in the rocket ship. There go the engines. Feel them rumbling? They shake your seat a little.”

  David was very much into the fantasy. I saw his small body shake with the movement of his imaginary spaceship. I noticed, too, Sheila at the end of the table, her elbows braced on the table edge, hands interlaced to shield her eyes from my view. She was participating, I suspected, but didn’t want me to realize she was joining in as another of the children.

  “It’s liftoff. Up, up, up you are going. The blue sky is rushing past you. It’s getting paler. See it? Look out your window and see how the earth is falling away and you are zooming into outer space. Ooooh, there you are, out in space.

  “Now, you can unfasten your seat belt and walk around, but ooh! What happens?”

  “You’re weightless,” Sheila said without a moment’s hesitation.

  “That’s right. You’re weightless. You float. What’s it feel like? Do you like it? Where are you going? Look around. What kind of rocket ship are you in? Is it big? Is it small? What colors are there? Is there lots of room to move around in? And where are you going? Where is the rocket ship headed? Look out the window. What do you see? Stars? Planets? Do you see Earth, or are you far away already? Is it crowded with things out there or is it very empty? Are there other spaceships out there? Look around your rocket ship again. Are you alone? Or is there someone traveling with you? Is it someone you like? What are you doing in the rocket ship just now?”

  I paused, watching the children, all deep in their fantasy. “Okay, now, when you’re ready, you may open your eyes and then I want you to draw me your spaceship.”

  As virtually always happened with this kind of activity, the children aroused from their imaginings excited and reached enthusiastically for the drawing materials.

  “I seen Dracula, Torey,” Violet said cheerfully. “And he had this big blob of blood hanging off his teeth.”

  “You’re weird,” David replied and reached across her for the felt tips.

  As I would soon discover happened every time we asked Violet to create something, she made a cross, as this symbol kept her safe from vampires. On this occasion, she made one large black cross before going on to make several more smaller crosses and around this she dotted small round faces, all with pleasant, fang-toothed smiles.

  David was drawing busily. He made a great red-and-white-striped rocket ship with a bright-yellow light shining out of its nose and was now surrounding it with an array of multicolored stars.

  Alejo had reached quickly for a felt-tip marker, but once he had it, he paused a long time over the blank paper, then slowly he began to draw. His spaceship was a tiny speck in a huge, black universe.

  It was this blackness that eventually got him into trouble. There was such a huge area of paper to cover that it soon became obvious he couldn’t do it with the small black felt tip he was using. Setting it down, he surveyed the available drawing materials before spying a large black marking pen on the far end of the table. Rising, he reached across David to get it. In the process, he accidentally bumped David’s hand.

  “You spaz!” David shouted and flung his arm out angrily.

  Within a split second, Alejo had him by the shirt. Indeed, it happened so very fast, I didn’t anticipate it and was alarmed to discover Alejo had pulled David off his chair and down to the floor before I had even managed to rise. Grabbing David by the hair, he slammed his head down against the linoleum.

  I dashed around the table, but before I could reach him, Alejo was off. In blind panic he ran. The room we had chosen in the school was normally a double classroom and we had picked it for its size. With so few children, however, we had not needed the many tables or chairs used by the ordinary pupils in the school; so we had shoved the large metal teacher’s desk into a far corner and then nested all the other tables and stacked them around it, before piling the chairs on top. It was here Alejo went, sliding in through the tangled legs of the tables and under the teacher’s desk to become virtually unreachable without moving them all.

  David was my immediate concern. He had gotten a nasty bash against the floor and was crying lustily, so I knelt to comfort him. Both Jeff and Miriam had come to my aid, and we all stood regarding Alejo in his hiding place. He, in turn, watched us with huge, dark eyes.

  “What should we do?” I asked Jeff. I was unsure whether fishing him out and making him sit in our “time-out chair” would be the appropriate action or whether he was too frightened to benefit from that.

  “Can I talk to him?” It was Sheila. “I could speak to him like I did the other day. Maybe I could get him to come out.”

  “Yes, I think that’s a good idea,” Jeff said. “You be in charge of Alejo, Sheila. You talk to him, and if you get him out, you keep him aside individually.”

  This seemed to surprise Sheila. “What should I do with him?”

  Jeff gave her a reassuring smile. “What seems right. You’ll know when the time comes.”

  The time didn’t come. Alejo stayed under the tables for the remainder of the morning.

  During the drive down to the bus station on Fenton Boulevard, Sheila was lost in pensive silence. “What was the point of that exercise with the rocket ship?” she asked after a long while in thought.

  “To help the children experience themse
lves, I suppose. That’s what creativity is all about, basically.”

  “So it was just an exercise in creativity?”

  “In expression. Most of the children in this group find it difficult to express their inner feelings, and I’ve found these kinds of activities often provide a good way to start.”

  Again Sheila fell silent. We went for five or six minutes without speaking.

  “Torey?”

  “Yes?”

  “I remember you doing that.”

  “Doing what?”

  “In our class. I remember you taking us on one of those imaginary trips. We went under the sea.” Her face suddenly lit up. “We were all sitting in a circle on the floor. On my knees. I was on my knees. You showed us these pictures of tropical fish in this magazine, and then you told us to close our eyes and we were going under the water. Under the sea to see the fish. And I remember all these fish swimming around, yellow-striped and turquoise, all colors.” Sheila was smiling.

  I smiled back and nodded.

  “Suddenly, I can remember that. Really clearly. Like it just happened. I can see us sitting there in that circle on the floor. I can see the blackboard behind you.”

  “Yes, we did it quite a lot. It was a favorite activity with almost everyone.”

  She smiled broadly. “And now I remember it. I can really remember.”

  Chapter 14

  Apparently Alejo felt we were too dangerous a group to deal with, because when he arrived the next morning, he wouldn’t get out of the taxi. Jeff went out and tried to talk him into coming into the school, but Alejo was having none of it. He cowered in the small floor space of the backseat. Jeff, who was not accustomed to his clients so vehemently not wanting to see him, was inclined to let Alejo go home again. He felt Alejo needed more time to work through this matter and would only make positive therapeutic progress if allowed to move at his own speed. I disagreed, feeling that if Alejo left now, he would never come back. Sensing that any possible future of staying with his adoptive family hinged on his learning more appropriate behaviors over the course of the summer, I doubted we could afford that kind of therapeutic luxury. So, despite Jeff’s misgivings and Alejo’s loud protests, I extracted him from the back of the taxi and carried him in.